Google AdWords/AdSense Arbitrageur Spotlighted But Who is Right?

Sep 15, 2008 - 8:13 am 3 by
Filed Under Google AdSense

The New York Times has a story about an AdSense/AdWords arbitrageur, a webmaster who makes money off getting visitors to his site through AdWords to have them click on his AdSense ads. The story is named Stuck in Google's Doghouse, where Dan Savage who runs SourceTool.com has sent a nine-page, 4,000-word letter to the antitrust division of the Justice Department over Google's business practices.

We have discussed the topic of arbitrage in this sense, even before it was coined that in the SEM world. But in May 2007, when Google decided to shut down arbitrageurs from what some may call, sucking the life of of the search results, it had a major hit for many small website operators. Including Dan Savage who made his money on making a few pennies of profit on those clicks.

Every since Google introduced the landing page quality score components, advertisers have been complaining big time. I wrote a pretty good summary of the history behind these AdWords Slaps in July, so you can read up about it over there. In short, while advertisers may have been paying $0.10 per click to get traffic, they may now be paying $10.00 for the same click, due to "quality score" factors that rose their bids.

Dan Savage is calling this move as monopolistic, at least in his case.

Google, he believed, didn’t like his Web directory because it was a search engine itself — though much more narrowly focused than Google’s search engine — and Google found it a competitive threat.

What’s more, Sourcetool competed directly with business.com, which was one of Google’s “content network partners,” meaning it gets additional advertising revenue because Google directs AdWords ads to the site as well as AdSense ads.

My thoughts? I am torn. I honestly don't think Google is going after business they find to be competitive. Heck, we see Yahoo advertising on Google, Ask.com advertising on Google and visa versa. But I do believe Google went after "arbitrageurs" because they felt the quality of those ads and results lead to a poor search experience. That is my thoughts and I can be wrong.

The debate is pretty wild in some of the forum threads:

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
Google Core Update Rumbling, Manual Actions FAQs, Core Web Vitals Updates, AI, Bing, Ads & More - YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 15, 2024

Mar 15, 2024 - 4:00 pm
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Core Update Rumbling, Manual Actions FAQs, Core Web Vitals Updates, AI, Bing, Ads & More

Mar 15, 2024 - 8:01 am
Google Updates

Google March 2024 Core & Spam Update Movement Today

Mar 15, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Image Search Results Testing Like Button

Mar 15, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Merchant Center Product Studio With Themed Templates Including St. Patrick's Day

Mar 15, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google Maps

Google Search Dishes Nearby Carousel

Mar 15, 2024 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google: Duplicate Content Penalty Does Not Exist